Understanding the horrors of North Korea: J.P. with Yeonmi Park
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Shasta Clokey
 November 22 2021
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    Yeonmi Park’s story was terrifying, beyond sad, surprisingly uplifting, and ominously illuminating. I could see the genuine pain Yeonmi experienced while talking about some of the terrible experiences she endured in North Korea, China and Mongolia. Yeonmi’s ability to educate herself, excel in university, and speak up about what she believes in the face of the North Korean government wanting her dead is inspiring beyond words.



    The utter privation of knowledge and basic necessities of life that Yeonmi suffered growing up in North Korea shook me to the core. I know that North Korea was a grim place, but I didn’t realize parents are separated from their kids for months at a time, children are tasked with gathering poop as a prize resource, people’s primary form of protein often comes from scrounging up grasshoppers, and those who break the rules in any way are sent to prison camps to be tortured and “re-educated”. Yeonmi’s explanation of guilt by association, incrimination based on ancestors who spoke out against the regime, and the prison systems that the “guilty” have to endure was horrifying. Yeonmi’s further explanation of how language and propaganda are used to stop North Korean people from understanding what it means to be free showed me how bad the world can get when everyone is afraid and no one speaks up.



    The rape, slavery, physical hardship, and dispassionate casual evil Yeonmi had to go through while escaping North Korea, enduring China, surviving the journey to Mongolia, and holding out to be granted refugee status was beyond sad. I had no idea that there are hundreds of thousands of North Korean women who have been trafficked to Chinese farmers as sex slaves. Jordan’s reflection on the effect of the one child policy and the fact that there are now thirty million men in China who will never have a partner was hard to reconcile. Yeonmi’s violent experience with one of these men and her ability to still see the humanity in him was heartbreaking. It was even harder to hear Yeonmi describe the way the Mongolian soldiers toyed with refugees after those refugees made the harrowing journey across a frozen tundra at negative forty degrees.



    Learning to read, getting a GED, and being accepted into a South Korean university all in one year was nothing less than a miracle that Yeonmi Park achieved. That this completely oppressed sixteen year old could tear through book after book, get inspired by authors like Orwell, and succeed in one of the most competitive education systems in the world is incredibly uplifting. Yeonmi’s choice to speak up about the injustices she faced was as courageous a decision a person can make.



    Hearing Yeonmi compare the censorship she felt at Columbia with the thought policing she experienced in North Korea was depressing. I experienced the same tendrils of woke ideology while attending Occidental College and know the pressure to be silent that she describes. I have no idea how we as a civilization are going to make it out of this mess and avoid the totalitarian future Yeonmi warns against. Hearing this heart wrenching conversation at least gave me hope that there is still time to speak up before more of the world descends into the dystopian reality that Yeonmi grew up in.



    link-preview-imageTyranny, Slavery and Columbia U | Yeonmi Park | The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - S4: E26On this episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, Jordan was joined by Yeonmi Park. Yeonmi Park is a North Korean defector and human rights activist trying to shine a light on the atrocities still being committed in North Korea by the current Kim regime. She wrote her experiences into a best...youtu.be


    #yeonmipark #jordanpeterson #northkorea #china #learning
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